Homeopathy, to paraphrase one of its cardinal tenets, looks at symptoms as being the idiom, dialect, or language, in which the body, in illness, speaks to us. The body’s response, thus, gives us the cue that a struggle to externalise is on. This provides us with the ‘prompt’ that potential damage is possible — once the illness becomes a deep-seated malady. This may also damage the core of our being.
When we see external symptoms, we often deduce that the illness has not gotten too deep. When symptoms disappear, it is a sign that it has been treated successfully, or entered a new realm, not obvious on the surface, but somewhere deep inside the body.
Conventional [allopathic] medicine thinks of symptoms as the illness, not as the body’s inner response to correct, or heal. Symptoms are, therefore, suppressed, or repressed, in the quickest time possible. Homeopathy, on the other hand, suggests that symptoms are a healthy mechanism — the body’s response to any external invasion. Homeopathy takes a detailed view of such manifestations and treats them with suitable remedies that can cause a ‘similar’ set of symptoms in the healthy individual.
Cause = Effect
Homeopathy suggests that bacteria, or viruses, are not, in actuality, the only cause of disease, or illness, albeit there are a host of exceptions to the rule. These micro-organisms, doubtless, trigger that paradigm shift and reside in the unwell organs and thrive in them. Think of worm influxes: of worms that feed on our sickly bowel. Or, Helicobacter pylori— which is largely prompted by stress.
Picture this — just before we fall sick, we all present with certain body signals. For example, an ‘itchy’ sensation in the throat, with snuffles, before the beginning of cold. This often responds to the homeopathic remedy, Hepar sulphuricum.
Or, abrupt onset of high fever, face hot and flushed, which corresponds to Belladonna.
Or, abrupt diarrhoea, with excessive bloating and gas, early in the morning, forcing one from bed, which responds to Aloe socotrina.
All these symptoms are, of course, not serious problems, but they can upset our daily routine and rhythm. Worse still, they may also change into amplified illness. If this is not welcoming trouble, what is?
Correcting The ‘Soil’
It is obvious that people who have an inner tendency towards catching infection often get affected, because the offending virus, or bacteria, find ideal growing conditions, or ‘soil.’ This may not be the case with others, who are healthy. They ward off the invader with impunity — without even realising it.
What about contagious and epidemic illnesses, you may well ask. This is a good question. The fact, again, is that epidemics affect those people who have a latent, inner disposition towards the given disease. It cannot trouble others who have a strong immunity. Likewise, it cannot affect your inner disposition to illness if the ‘condition’ is removed with homeopathic remedies, or when the illness is cured with their use.
There’s also an additional advantage — homeopathic treatment ensures prevention.
On the other side of the continuum, when powerful conventional drugs are used to treat a health concern, only the bacteria get killed, while the symptoms of the illness are merely suppressed. Your symptoms are your first line of defence — the result is compromised health, or an open invite to viral, or bacterial, incursions.
The next time you get the ‘same’ illness, you will need a higher dose of the conventional drug, or more powerful newer drugs. This may lead to drug-resistance. The ‘same’ medications may also not work any longer. It is a vicious cycle — a major drawback of conventional treatment, although it is often best suited for bacterial infections.
When new incursions happen and when individuals are treated with higher doses of antibiotics, to pick another example, the micro-organisms may only die on the surface. However, some go down, sneaking-in through. They may now affect other organs and tissues.
The problem becomes perennial with no real hope in sight.
To state yet another classical example. Just visit any school in your vicinity. You will be able to see several children showing signs of some ‘chronic’ illness — right from allergies, cold, bronchitis to allergic asthma, recurrent illnesses and also serious diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease. This may be one reason, perhaps, why some erudite allopathic physicians themselves avoid the use of strong, powerful drugs, or antibiotics, at the drop of a symptom.
When Louis Pasteur came out with his landmark theory that bacteria were the real cause of illnesses, Dr Samuel Hahnemann, MD, the founder of homeopathy, had advanced his idea of ‘murderous small entities’ affecting our health. This is one big reason why most homeopaths maintain that treatment should always strengthen our body and mind systems and flush illnesses out of the system — and, not merely kill the micro-organisms, as conventional medicine is keyed to ‘achieve.’
Homeopathy is pragmatic medicine. It places a natural regulatory mechanism within our bodily systems — this makes us better equipped to fend intruders, or beat them naturally, without the fear of unwanted ripple effects in our system.
Homeopathy helps us to become healthier than before when we drive out illnesses. In other words, it helps in keeping oneself healthy — from the inside-out. This is not just elimination of external symptoms, or illnesses, that appear on the surface. It’s reaching deep down and eliminating the cause of a lurking health problem, or nullifying it before it expands into full-blown symptoms.
Systemic Regulation
Recent research suggests that the homeopathic holistic approach introduces systemic regulation, that we touched upon at the outset, in order to enlist the connected memory of networks in a way that is rational and also endowed with a natural, endogenous healing potential. This is achieved, as research suggests, by complexity science, where the homeopathic remedy could transmit a global oscillatory pattern of information that expands our inherent network connectivity at specific points where it was lost, owing to illness.
The reasoning today is simple — chronic diseases are nothing but new pathologic attractors for which homeopathic remedies are fully capable of ‘unsticking’ the system from this attractor, while swerving it in opposite direction and ‘grasping’ it on the rebound which the network naturally produces in answer to any annoyance. In actual terms, the homeopathic remedy is the therapeutic result that increases such network connectivity by placing the information while stimulating its nodes in a pattern ‘similar’ to the disease, i.e., in accordance to the ‘likes cure likes principle,’ or similarity of symptoms.
The key point emerging from recent developments, according to Dr Paulo Bellavite, MD, professor of general pathology, University of Verona, Italy, in the peer-reviewed journal, Homeopathy, is such complexity science can shape the following working hypothesis:
- The homeopathic simillimum — the most appropriate remedy for a given patient and illness — may be perceived by specific centres [or, ‘nodes’] of network regulatory systems as complex information regarding whole disease dynamics
- Symptom patterns are external expressions of complex reactions caused by a medicine [in sensitive ‘provers’] and by disease [in sick persons]: so, the classical ‘similitude of symptoms’ according to which the correct drug may be chosen on the basis of careful analysis of symptoms may bypass the possible lack of knowledge of molecular details of disease dynamics
- In acute diseases, the simillimum may activate local feedback [e.g., conventional anti-histamines. or the homeopathic remedy, Apis mellifica [made from honeybee], on basophils, or white blood cells which appear in several specific kinds of inflammatory reactions, more so in conditions that causeallergic symptoms, but may also reinforce the connectivity of local reactions with systemic [bodily] reactions [Note: Research suggests that basophils release histamine when activated by something like a bee sting. Homeopathic dilutions of Apis mellifica are evidenced to stop basophils from releasing histamine. This is why bee sting and other bites respond to and heal quickly when given homeopathic doses of Apis mellifica]
- In chronic diseases, the simillimum may operate by ‘unblocking’ the pathological attractor and orienting the network towards a pattern that is approximate to healthy homeodynamics. Homeodynamics is one of the basic concepts of medicine in which the body maintains biochemical individuality by constantly undergoing physiological and metabolical processes
- The high specificity of action of homeopathic remedies, as research testifies, may be due to the sensitisation [‘priming’] of involved network nodes, including the complexity and consistency of homeopathic medicinal effects at various physiological [functional] levels.
